Blood Brothers by Dr. Frank E. Vandiver Ph.D. A Short History of the Civil War (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series)

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Synopsis

Brothers by blood before the war; brothers inblood after. The blood mingled in the Civil Was became the symbol and perverse source of indissoluble union between two sections, two ways of life, two visions of the future, and even two revolutions.

In riveting detail, veteran Civil War historian Frank E. Vandiver recounts the campaigns and major battles of the first war of the Industrial Revolution, with its machinery, firepower, and engineering beyond imagination. With provocative insight, he traces a picture of the war as rooted in the character and vision of its two leaders and their two sectional revolutions.

In the North, Abraham Lincoln built a massive war effort by expanding executive authority, sometimes in ways beyond the Constitution. Not only emancipation, but also new monetary policies, new forms of commercial organization and production, and new ways of raising and commanding armies made a different United States, shaped for world power.

In the service of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, a states’ righter, became a Confederate nationalist. Keeping up the fight forced him and many Southerners to accept both a centralization and an industrialization they hated. When the dream was lost and the country gone, vestiges of this revolution would make the Southern system compatible with the new economic, social, and political system that had emerged in the North. The South might look back fondly, but it was readier than it knew for what would come: a new union, one and finally indivisible.

FRANK E. VANDIVER was Distinguished University Professor, President Emeritus of Texas A&M University, and Director of the Mosher Institute for Defense Studies. He was Professor of History and Provost of Rice University. He has been Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University and has taught at the United States Military Academy. His books include Black Jack: The Life and Times of John J. Pershing (National Book Awards Finalist), Mighty Stonewall: Shadows of Vietnam: Lyndon Johnson's War, and Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy.